The Stranger in the Mirror

*Trigger Warning*

Mental Health & Gore

Looking in the mirror the person staring back at you is a stranger. A clear image of the person you used to be. But honestly, the person staring back at you has not been "you" for a long time. The time when things were simple and innocent are long gone, replacing them with a dark and sinful nature. Looking in the mirror we are supposed to see the person we are, not the person we lost, we are supposed to see someone we are proud of not someone we rather not be. Looking in the mirror is now a horrid way to torture and violate your inner thoughts with destructive and calloused memories of the person you used to be, of the girl you used to be.

A stranger in your own body, a stranger in your own mind. It is almost as if a ghost is staring back at you as you try so desperately to grab onto anything that could support the storm that is brewing in your mind. Being alone with your thoughts is leading you to a more gruesome realization that your once comforted and protected mind is now the most treacherous tornado anyone has ever seen, with strong winds, deadly rain and traumatizing lightning wrecking lands and leaving people dead, making your way through the world, trying hard to find who you are.

You never really know who you are until you lose yourself. Lose yourself so much that you become a phantom-like creature standing in this place called "home". No one ever really talks about how one feels when they lose sight of themselves or how its feelings to look in the mirror and not recognize the girl staring back at you. You know this girl, but she looks different, pale, fragile, and broken. She looks as if death itself is sucking the life out of her. You would think she would fight, but she holds out her arms to let death take over her body as she stands there lifeless with sealed-over eyes and sickly white lips that mumble the words "I am done fighting". Without warning an ear-piercing scream breaks free, as the mirror shatters into a million pieces and lodges into your body. The shards of glass move deeper and deeper into your pale-like skin as you try to claw and scratch at the pain that is turning your vision blurry and scattered. But it is no use, the pieces individually sink into your skin and cut away at muscle, veins, and arteries, and then eventually make their way to your heart but stop short when they come to notice that the heart is not beating. Instead of turning back, they attack the heart with sharp edges and leave no time for mercy. But can you kill a heart that has already stopped beating? Our hearts job is to keep us alive, keep us on our feet and not dead in the street. But what of a heart that has stopped beating? Hearts are supposed to beat, is your heart that broken that it does not even have the will to continue its job it was given when you were born, is it so damaged, bruised and threatened that it quit at giving you life? Why is it that your heart is not beating, but you are still alive?

Does this mean you have been dead all along and did not realize until the heart was under attack by the girl in the mirror?

She is gone. She has disappeared from the mirror. Not only that, but she is broken, she is destroyed, and she is left lifeless on the floor of her room not bothering to call out for help. Why ask for help when no one understands the hurricane that is demolishing you from the inside out? Breaking bones, cutting veins, severing vital organs, blood spilling from the glass cuts soaking your carpet as you drag your lifeless self to the bathroom to clean up the mess. It is no use, the damage has been done, the cuts too deep and the trauma too real.

Does the trauma we keep at bay come back to haunt our dreams as we sleep? The demons within we try so hard to push down so we do not give in to brutal telling of our minds. The impetuous berating of the voices in your head soon take over just like the stranger in the mirror, that took over your body and makes you feel everything you suppressed in the back of your mind. You always knew the trauma was there but never thought the girl in the mirror was the cause of it all. Sometimes the thoughts of who you would be if you did not have all this baggage take root in your brain. but are soon pushed away by the demon that occupies your body and your mind. You think you can turn her off by sleeping, but it only gives her another place to play as she gets stronger and stronger until the girl you used to be is blackened and darkened.

All lights are turned off, no one is home, and no one is alive. The girl you once knew is dead, the storm took over, the storm of your mind, the storm of the ghost in your body. A switch was flipped, a light was turned off, and a disastrous state of mind takes over everything you own and kills anything you ever loved. You have lost your mind, you have lost your love, you have lost your hope but most of all you lost, you. One never really knows how to get something back once it is gone, there will be all kinds of people that will tell you something different. A therapist would tell you "Take back your life", and your parents would tell you "You are just overthinking it". But what about those little voices in your head that are saying "You have lost your mind", saying that "you have gone off the deep end"? You are sinking fast with weights tied on your ankles dragging you into the abyss, cutting off the circulation to your brain, you sink back into your mind as you uncover all the dirty and sinister intentions of the person inhibiting your body.

It is a morbid discovery when you realize you no longer inhabit your body and your mind. It is an even morbid discovery when you do not even know how to bring yourself back to life. The dead are dead just like the living are living. But what if you are dead but living? Dead in your own body but living through the perspective of the stranger you once called "you". Furthermore, we never really think a storm is going to be bad until the storm has come, just like we never know how broken we are until we break. Certain storms can bring terror to eyes that have never been scared before, can bring a strong man to his knees, and bring strong-minded women to the brink of insanity. So what is it about being broken that wakes the storm inside us? It makes you wonder if that storm had been there all along or if it just started taking root. There had to of been a trigger, a something or someone that woke the beast, that poked the bear. There is never a definite trigger unless you are the trigger, the person in the mirror, the girl in the mirror.

Something wakes the darkest parts of our minds and makes us break into a million pieces. The reflection blurs, the pain sinks in, and the cuts reopen as we try to pull ourselves back to reality. Try to claw our way back into our body to reactivate our mind, to kill the monster that took over us. Flesh ripping, screams radiating through the silent, pitch-dark bedroom, until we take back our life. The girl in the mirror is sobbing, shaking and silent, but now the girl in the mirror is unrecognizable. Through the mirror and out past the brick wall is the little girl you once were, smiling at you with gap teeth and pink lips as she says to you "The fight has ended". The girl in the mirror is you, you climb your way back from insanity as you regain the body, and the mind you once knew so deeply, and then you wake from your sleep realizing it was just a nightmare. You walk to your bathroom covered in sweat and tears and look in the mirror in hopes of seeing the girl in the mirror but what is staring back at you is the devil. With a sinister smile and dark morbid eyes, you let out a heart ripping scream as you are dragged into the mirror and ripped from yourself once again, only this time it is not a dream, it is all to real.